The homeless brother I cannot save

A year ago, Jay traded my parents' home for the street. But the more I try to help him, the more I lose myself

By Ashley Womble

(Credit: Chris Schmidt)

Like any New Yorker, I was no stranger to homeless people. I passed by them on my way to the shiny glass tower where I worked for a glossy women’s magazine: the older lady perched atop a milk crate in the subway station, the man curled up in a dirty sleeping bag and clutching a stuffed animal. They were unfortunate ornaments of the city, unlucky in ways I never really considered.

Until one hot summer day in 2009 when my little brother Jay left his key on the coffee table and walked out of his house in West Texas to live on the streets instead. In the days that followed I spent hours on the phone with detectives, social workers and even the FBI, frantically trying to track him down. A friend designed a “Missing” poster using the most recent picture I had of him wearing a hoodie and a Modest Mouse T-shirt, a can of beer in his hand and a deer-in-headlights expression on his face. I created a Facebook group and contacted old acquaintances still living in our hometown of Lubbock, begging everyone I even remotely knew to help me find him. No luck. If it had been me, a pretty young white woman, chances are my face would have been all over the news — but the sudden disappearance of a 20-year-old guy with paranoid schizophrenia didn’t exactly warrant an Amber Alert.

In the year and a half that mental illness had ravaged my brother’s mind, I’d learned to lower my expectations of what his life would be like. The smart kid who followed politics in elementary school probably wouldn’t become a lawyer after all. Instead of going to college after high school, Jay became obsessed with 9/11 conspiracy theories. What began as merely eccentric curdled into something manic and disturbing: He believed the planners of 9/11 were a group of people called “The Cahoots” who had created a 24-hour television network to monitor his actions and control his thoughts — a bizarre delusion that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Eventually, his story expanded until “The Cahoots” became one branch of the New World Order, a government whose purpose was to overturn Christianity, and he had been appointed by God to stop it.

This made it hard for him to act normal, even in public. He’d lost his job busing tables after yelling, “Stop the filming and hand over the tapes” to everyone dining in the restaurant. Having friends or even a coherent conversation wouldn’t be possible unless he took the anti-psychotic medication he’d been prescribed while he was in the mental hospital. A legal adult, he was allowed to refuse treatment, and he did. Otherwise “The Cahoots” would win.

I counted each day he’d been missing until they became weeks, until the number was so high I wondered if he was even still alive. That number was about the only thing I continued to keep track of. Dirty clothes and dishes piled up at home, deadlines were missed at work, and I only got out of bed if it was absolutely necessary. I cried often, but especially during thunderstorms, a reminder that wherever my brother was, he was unprotected. Eventually it became clear that I was losing it, too. So I did what my brother wouldn’t allow himself to do: I started taking a pill that helped usher away my anxiety and depression.

Weeks after Jay disappeared, police in Maryland found him talking to a spider and had him hospitalized. He stayed for 72 hours. Then he went missing again.

Sept. 11, 2009, was one of those drizzling mornings when I thought of my brother. There was the usual undertone of reverent sadness in the city, but for me, the date was a reminder of all that had gone wrong inside Jay’s mind. Yet on that day my phone finally rang.

“Hello.” Jay’s Southern drawl was unmistakable. I sat straight up in my desk chair at work wondering what I should do. Record the call? Take notes?

“Where are you?” I asked, images of him sitting in a jail cell or stranded alone in an alley flashed in my head, but I still wasn’t prepared for the answer he gave.

“Manhattan,” he said.

My heart filled with hope. Then he asked me if I’d gone to the witchcraft celebration at the World Trade Center, where the Sorcerers had ordered the wind and the rain to destroy the ceremony. Once again, I just felt like a helpless stranger.

I asked nervously if I could buy him dinner. To my surprise, he agreed. Twenty minutes later I met him near Penn Station, hunched under an awning next to a big blue tarp that covered his backpack and my paisley Le Sportsac duffel he’d once borrowed. His pale skin had tanned and hair covered his face. He was staring at people as they walked by, but he didn’t see me until I said his name. Standing face-to-face it was clear that he had lost a lot of weight. His cheekbones jutted out from his once-full face. If I had seen his picture I would have gasped. Instead, I just held out my arms.

Since it was raining, I suggested we walk across the street to Starbucks, so we could decide where to go for dinner. The truth was that I wanted to get a better look at him and decide if I (once again) needed to call the police who would most likely commit him involuntarily to a mental hospital. Since I’d rushed from work to meet him I was wearing stilettos, a pencil skirt and silk top. Jay looked like he hadn’t bathed in over a week. His hair stood straight up from grease and (I guessed) constant pulling and he was wearing a lime green T-shirt he had made before he left home with a screen-printed Egyptian woman and the words “Ishtar is the whore of Babylon.” Ishtar, whom you may remember from Greek mythology, had surpassed “The Cahoots” as the primary character in Jay’s world. He told me that “that whore Ishtar” had been popping up everywhere lately as if it were the most hysterical thing he’d ever heard. He was laughing, I soon discovered, because a picture of Ishtar was on his cup of hot chocolate. And here I thought it was just the Starbucks logo. But I saw in Jay something I hadn’t seen in previous conversations, marked by anxious breathing and gibberish: He was relaxed, even concise.

Zagat has no recommendations for where you should take your homeless brother to dinner. We settled on the Mexican chain Chevy’s and sat in a booth near the back. He told me about hitchhiking to New York and sleeping in Central Park until the cops kicked him out. He grinned as he talked about sleeping on the steps of a downtown school, his smile still as charming as it had been when he was 7 and gave me a matchbox Dodge Viper on my 16th birthday, saying he wished he could buy me the real thing.

“Do you consider yourself homeless?” I asked.

“Oh, yes!” he answered proudly. I wondered if the constant motion of wandering from town to town, never knowing where he would sleep or eat next, helped quiet the voices he heard. If it was his own kind of medication, and if so, could I really tell him that was the wrong way to live?

When the food arrived, Jay dug into the chips with his grubby hands. As he lectured me about the New World Order, I thought about little specks of dirt flying off of his fingers and onto the salted chips. “You can have some of this,” he motioned to the chile con queso. I had a choice at that moment: I could ignore the gross factor and eat with my brother — insanity, filth and all— or I could keep my hands clean and preserve the distance that had grown between us. I went for the chips.

Earlier in the year I’d bribed him with a trip to visit me on the condition that he took his meds. Now he was sitting in front of me and as much as I wanted to let him stay in my apartment – and because my therapist discouraged it and my roommate rightly put her foot down — I knew I couldn’t let him. I approached the topic cautiously, my voice shaking as I asked, “Do you know why you can’t stay with me?” His voice small and shamed, he answered, “Because I won’t take my medication.” He had always denied that he had schizophrenia, but his omission gave me hope that maybe some day that would change.

I tried to quiet my own inner voice that told me Jay needed to be in the hospital where a team of psychiatrists in white coats experimented with medications that would fix his mind. I could do some things for my brother: I could give him a little money for cigarettes. I could buy him a new backpack, a sleeping bag, good walking shoes. But the more I pushed him to get help, the more my own sanity escaped me.

So I let him go. He went to New Jersey. Florida. Louisiana. To a place where he told me from a pay phone he wouldn’t call anymore because he didn’t want me to know his whereabouts. I can only imagine what he looks like after a year on the streets: His hair must be long, skin tan and hardened, and his rail-thin body caked in dirt. He probably doesn’t look much different than the homeless people I pass by on the streets of New York City. Seeing them makes my heart ache, makes me think about those they may have left behind, people who long to dust them off and put them down the right path but who know, in the end, it’s not their choice.

Ashley Womble lives in New York City. She is writing a memoir.

: Ashley Womble lives in Brooklyn and is writing a memoir. More Ashley Womble

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My ex went to prison for sex crimes

He ruined our marriage but never my family. It took years of struggle, and a long road trip, to let go of the pain

By Jean Ellen Whatley

(Credit: iStockphoto/shakzu)

Topics:Coupling, Divorce, Life stories, Real Families

People assume the wife knows. Not really. I found out about my former husband’s descent into pedophilia at the same time the rest of the world did — on the 10 o’clock news.

My mind could not comprehend what my eyes were seeing. I studied his mug shot on TV. Here was the face of the man I had loved, the cleft in his chin, his square jaw, the soft, smooth skin just below his eyes, which I’d kissed a thousand times. Who was this broken man with the downcast eyes? Did he look away when the shutter closed because he was thinking of his children? What happened to the proud young father who cradled his newborns like fragile glass, the guy with a contagious laugh and shiny blue eyes, who owned any room he walked into? A hometown celebrity, a respected journalist, with a good wife and four great kids — now, reduced to this. Who was this man?

The kids in bed, I turned down the volume on the TV in a futile attempt to shield them for just one more day. My colleagues in the press, with whom I’d jockeyed for position at many a crime scene, were now covering a crime that would deal my kids a blow unimaginable. “The accused is charged with three counts of statutory sodomy stemming from a series of sexual encounters with a teenage boy at a high school field house.” For years I’d been blase about broadcasting the worst day of someone else’s life. In one minute, I knew what that felt like.

What would I say to my children? How could I prepare them? I had one son in college, a 17-year-old, a 14-year-old and my youngest, barely 13. How does a mother explain sodomy to a seventh grader? How does a mother suck back into the cylinder the toxic cloud that has just exploded all over her family? How could he?

Disbelief turned to maternal rage, like jet fuel in my blood. I would not let him ruin my children’s future. I would not let his indefensible addiction stain their beautiful lives. And in this flashpoint, I seized the strength of a righteous fury long trapped.

I had been one of those kids once, a victim kid. A little girl caught in a hopeless game of duck and cover. I remained silent for decades, until I simply couldn’t hold down the bile of violation and secrecy any longer. I was in my 40s when I finally told my mother that my stepdad had molested me. By then he was was dead. I’d even delivered the eulogy at his funeral, skipping over his ignoble deeds. Little did I know that the man I was married to — the man in the first pew, dabbing his eyes — would end up in prison years later for committing some crimes of his own.

I had no clue when I married him that the very thing I was running away from, I was actually running to. This happens sometimes to people who were sexually abused; we tend to behave like refugees. We don’t assert our rights, because we’re not sure we have any. We lack confidence in scrutinizing others, because we feel like damaged goods ourselves.

But in time, I stood up for myself, challenging the endless hours he spent on the Internet, his increasing disengagement from our family. Backed into a corner, he told me he was gay. I told him to get out. But they don’t lock people up for being gay anymore. No longer under the wary eye of a wife, or the threat of being discovered, he took greater risks. He was found out by a mother who made a painful discovery about what was keeping her son so busy on the computer.

After a 14-month IV drip of news coverage, my former husband was sentenced to seven years in prison for having sex with that teenage boy. I spent those seven years trying to convince my children that the sins of their father were not carried on their backs, seven years of trying to help them deflect the shame by association that I had endured firsthand. Seven years; I was like a widow with no death benefits, no child support, no moral support, no “every-other-weekend” relief, no one to call in the middle of the night to meet me at the hospital with a sick kid, nobody else to ante up for college or cars, braces or bail money. Nothing. We inherited nothing, except enough pain and financial hardship to throw us all into a bottomless well with no rope, just the bucket tossed in behind us, smackin’ us on the head. But guess what?

We climbed out. We climbed out of that dark, slimy drowning hole by our bloody fingernails, each one, pushing up the next, back into the sunlight, where we sat on the side of the well, flicking off the mud. We made it. Three of my four kids are now out of college, the fourth will graduate next year. They’re amazing: loving, resilient, remarkably well adjusted, and a funnier lot, I have never seen.

I just didn’t realize how tired I was. It’s hard to process stuff while you’re holding up a car. When my brother died not long ago — the second of my brothers to die inside a few short years — I hit the mat. I couldn’t rally. I found myself asking, “Is this it? Really? Is this what my life is about?” Have you ever felt that way? Like you just might lose it?

So I did something radical. I set the car down, got behind the wheel and drove — all across America. I blew off my soul-killing, 60-hour-a-week job, took every last dime I had in savings (which wasn’t even enough to get back home on), loaded up my dog and more baggage than I realized and hit the road. We drove all over the country last summer, traveling through 21 states, from Missouri to New York to California and back again. I needed a defibrillator as big as a nation. I went to reconnect with every place and every person I had ever loved. I went to find a half-brother I had never seen. I went seeking solace.

What I got was healing. Eight weeks and more than 8,000 miles later, at a scenic overlook alongside a lonely, two-lane highway, it all got settled. Gazing out at the endless Utah desert, I sat on a huge, flat rock with my dog watching the sun go down. We were safe and dry, but out on the far horizon brewed a huge thunderstorm. Rain in the desert comes down in grey, vertical shafts from giant pink and purple clouds. Looking out at what felt like infinity, I was inspired to let it all go. I simply let it go.

All the egregious offenses that had been hurled my way — a betrayed wife, an abused child — over time, had ceased to matter. They were like a downpour on the desert, dark stabs into a porous surface. I absorbed them to make my life better, yes better, because along the way, I’d been blessed with the wisdom that there is far more surface than there is rain.

How quickly the pain can vanish if we are open to the healing. Mile by mile, house by house — at the end of this road trip in which I’d been embraced by friends, family, strangers on the highway, and yes, my found brother, I realized how fortunate I really am. The grimy corners of shame and bitterness had been scrubbed clean by love. Victim, no more.

We’ve heard a lot about victims in the news lately and the staggering abuse that came from people who were charged with helping them, not hurting them. Heads should roll. But, in the cacophony of competing sound bites, with the accusations, denials, demands for retribution and pleas for justice, there is a vital message that isn’t breaking through.

Healing is possible.

It takes time. It takes courage. It takes trusting another human being enough to open up your mind and your heart to speak your truth.

If I had a chance to yell from a mountaintop to anyone whose life has been marred by sexual abuse, here’s what I would say: There is a place where it’s safe and dry. Come see how fleeting the rain can be.

: Jean Ellen Whatley is a writer in St. Louis, Missouri. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, "Off the Leash: A Woman, Her Dog and the Road Trip to Revival." More Jean Ellen Whatley

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Was I selfish to have fertility treatments?

As the mother of twins, I know people suspect I had help getting pregnant. But why am I so self-conscious about it?

By Jane Roper

(Credit: Franz Pfluegl via Shutterstock)

Topics:New Mom Confessions, Life stories, Pregnancy, Real Families, Motherhood

When I found out I was pregnant with twins, one of my first thoughts was, “Great. Now everyone’s going to wonder if I had fertility treatments.”

And they do: People ask all kinds of probing questions — from the sometimes innocent, “Do twins run in your family?” to the blatant, “Was it natural?”

And it wasn’t. Our twins were the result of ovulation stimulation drugs and an IUI (intrauterine insemination).

But the question I started asking myself was: Why should I care if people suspected or knew I needed “help” getting pregnant? Especially in an age in which so many women seek medical intervention when they have trouble conceiving. And especially at a time when twins are becoming the new normal: Recently, the CDC reported that 1 in every 30 babies born in the United States today is a twin.

Part of my self-consciousness came from the fact that infertility treatments are an intimate affair. Your private parts are prodded, your internal organs scrutinized, and your bodily fluids drawn. Nobody looks at one little baby and thinks, “Gee, wonder how that thing got made?” whereas multiples beg the question: How exactly did that happen? I wasn’t crazy about my reproductive process being speculated upon or, more to the point, given any thought at all.

But there was more to it than that.

Was I simply ashamed that I couldn’t get pregnant on my own? Did I feel inadequate or even “broken,” as a friend of mine who recently had IVF said she did? Not really. There were times when my husband and I felt frustrated and angry at our inability to conceive, but I never worried that other people would judge me for something beyond my control. Nor do I have any religious or ethical qualms about responsibly administered fertility treatments (i.e., the kind carefully monitored so as to avoid higher-order multiples). No one has ever scolded me for going against “God’s plan,” but if they did, I would politely tell them I disagree. To me, assisted fertility is no more “playing God” than administering CPR.

It is, however, a choice. And in the eyes of many people it’s a selfish one. Just read the comments thread under any story on this topic. And this, I realized, was at the heart of my reluctance to let people know how my twin daughters came to be. I worried they would think I’d acted selfishly. On some level, I wondered if they were right.

Having infertility treatments is selfish, the argument typically goes, because the world population is burgeoning. Meanwhile, there are thousands of children out there in need of good homes. So why don’t infertile couples (or “these women,” as it’s more typically put, as if their partners are merely being dragged along for the ride) just adopt?

Back when we were in our 20s, my husband and I always said we’d adopt if we weren’t able to get pregnant on our own. If it wasn’t meant to be, it wasn’t meant to be. But when I was just shy of 30, the desire to have a baby kicked in, and it kicked in hard. I wanted to experience pregnancy, and both of us wanted the experience of creating and nurturing a person who was genetically linked to us. It was a primal and surprisingly powerful urge.

By that time we’d learned that “just adopting” is anything but simple. Fees and expenses can run anywhere from $5K-$50K and whether you adopt domestically or internationally, the process can take years, and can be a roller coaster of anticipation, disappointment and complex legal issues. In addition, adopted children are more likely to have special healthcare needs, developmental delays and mental health issues.

So when making a baby on our own proved challenging, we didn’t say, “Guess we’ll just adopt.” We went to a fertility clinic, got tested, and talked over our options with the doctor. They were confident that they could help us, and we agreed to give it a shot. This was what we wanted.

Our insurance required that we try the least invasive approach first: ovulation stimulation drugs, with careful monitoring to try to prevent a multiple pregnancy. We were fortunate that our route to conception was a relatively simple one. On our third attempt, I was pregnant. And we were thrilled — in spite of being taken aback by the fact that there were two babies on the way.

Now, our daughters are 5 years old, and we can’t imagine life without them. These days, I don’t much care if people think I was selfish to have undergone treatment to help conceive them. I honestly don’t think my choice was any more selfish than anyone’s choice to have a child.

One woman I spoke to recently on this topic put it perfectly. Like many women who struggle with infertility, she was asked by friends if she considered adoption before getting infertility treatments. She said to me, “I always wanted to ask them, the ones who were parents, in particular: Did you consider adopting before you went and tried to have a baby on your own? And if you didn’t, why should I?’”

Why, indeed, should infertile couples be automatically expected to adopt? Why should the onus be on them to make this noble and unselfish choice, when the desire for a biological child is something shared equally by fertile and infertile couples?

Yes, my husband and I would probably have pursued adoption if we had exhausted the possibilities for having our own children, provided we could muster the financial and emotional resources to do so. Adoption is a wonderful avenue for building a family. But the technology was there for us to conceive a child — and, as it turned out, children — of our own. We had every right to use it.

: Jane Roper’s memoir of twin pregnancy, parenting and clinical depression, "Double Time," will be published in May by St. Martin’s Press. She blogs at Baby Squared on Babble, and lives in the Boston area. More Jane Roper

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Stop diagnosing my son

When we adopted Jake at 7, we waited years before letting a psychologist label him. Others haven't been so kind

By Debra Hanlon

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Topics:Real Families, Children, Motherhood, Adoption, Parenting

“Sounds like your son has Asperger’s syndrome,” she said. “Have you ever thought of that?”

I looked back at my son, hanging upside down on the monkey bars. “Sounds like you have Asshole syndrome,” I said. “Have you ever thought of that?”

In my head, I said that. What I said out loud was something like, “We think he’s just Jake, and that’s good enough for us.”

“Well, he might have Asperger’s,” she pursued. “And you should have him tested.”

“Well, you might be a bitch,” I said, in my head. “Is there a test for that?”

My actual words were, “We’re not interested in labeling him at this point.”

I was standing under a tree with a woman from our home-school play group when this dreaded “developmental milestones conversation” occurred. Her son had all his multiplication facts memorized; mine still hadn’t memorized addition facts. Her son was complimented for being polite; mine often ignored other children’s personal space. Her son was reading three grade levels ahead; mine was reading three below.

Well-meaning folks, I discovered, were happy to share their unsolicited pop psychology diagnosis of my son, certain I’d be grateful for the 15 seconds of thought they put into it. In modern American culture, we are quick to participate in the labeling melee. Someone’s “ADD is kicking in,” and another is “so OCD,” and their boss is “obviously bipolar.” It’s common lingo. So why not label a kid who seems a bit different?

But it was this labeling issue that smacked me in the face when I became a parent.

In 2002, my husband, John, and I traveled to Ukraine to adopt our son. Jake was 7 ½, weighing 35 pounds and speaking rapid Russian, he raced into our lives like a little tornado. The adoption process prepared us for disabilities. We were told Jake had “psycho-motor delay,” a common catch-all meaning “he might be slightly behind.” He couldn’t read or write, not even his own name.

The typical route for most parents adopting older children from a foreign country is to have their kids evaluated as soon as they return to the States. We hesitated. “Of course he’s going to have delays,” John said. “He’s lived in an orphanage his whole life and he’s the size of a 4-year-old.” Before a professional informed us what was wrong with Jake, we wanted to let Jake show us who he was on his own.

The first weeks at home were thrilling and exhausting. Jake explored everything. He played with our two German shepherds, he flipped light switches off and on and off and on. He opened the front door and ran into the street with the dogs. He touched everything and sniffed everything else. He hugged anyone who showed him kindness, including the baggers at the grocery store.

He was curious, joyful and supremely energetic. He pounded trees with sticks, broke branches off the bushes to use as play swords, did flips off his bed, tried to do pull-ups off the bathroom towel bar. He enchanted and amazed us.

But he was also fidgety. As I began working with him on numbers or letters in brief sessions, our son demonstrated the attention span of a flea.

“He might have ADHD,” I told John. “He just can’t focus on anything — unless it’s something he really wants to do, like build with Legos.”

John could relate. As an adult he self-diagnosed his ADHD and understood what it was to grow up unfocused. With Jake’s 12-word English vocabulary and overabundance of energy, we decided to home-school him, at least until he caught up.

That first year was glorious. We went to the zoo every two weeks as part of animal study. We caught bugs in the backyard and took nature hikes. We cooked. We sang. We danced. We worked on letters, numbers and sounds. Jake thrived, and we kept going.

But after two and a half years, we hit a plateau. Jake was stuck. And I couldn’t figure out how to unstick him. John and I began to believe a diagnosis might help now, if only because it would help us figure out how to help him.

His assessment was no surprise. It included ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia and auditory processing disorder. Overwhelmed but determined, I hoarded books from the library, talked to specialists and surfed the Web for techniques and curricula that would match his multiple diagnoses — and the boy I knew.

And a new question arose: What do we tell Jake?

I’ve talked to many parents, of both adopted and biological children, who’ve struggled with the same dilemma. Our kids usually know they’re different, but they often don’t understand it.

Some parents bust out the clinical terms and explain each: ADD, OCD, SID, ADHD, Asperger’s, autism. The alphabet soup of the multi-diagnosis becomes part of the family’s regular dialogue. Others take a less scientific approach, focusing on their child’s gifts and differences rather than deficits. We wanted to celebrate those differences, but also understand and work around his deficits, making certain he sees there’s a place for him in the world. Where was that line between cold analysis and sugarcoated truth?

John and I tried to find a middle road that explained his diagnoses but focused on his uniqueness. So ADHD became: “You have a turbo-charged jet engine that likes to move fast.” Dyslexia was: “Your eyes sometimes flip words around like a carnival ride, which makes it hard for you to see what’s actually on the page.” And auditory processing disorder was: “Sometimes things float in the shallow end of your mind for a while before they go in deep so your brain can make sense of them.”

I think these gave Jake a sense of peace. But that didn’t mean we didn’t have problems. A few months later, mid-morning of an early fall day, the kitchen table was stacked with school books and laptops, mugs of hot tea, and plates scattered with pumpkin muffin crumbs— and Jake was in the throes of a full-scale math meltdown.

“There’s something missing in my brain,” Jake wailed. “I’m missing a wire somewhere that ruins my thinking. I think God made a mistake on my brain.”

“Jake,” I said his name clearly and firmly, and as lovingly as possible, “there is nothing wrong with you, and God does not make mistakes.”

We pushed math aside for the day and took the dogs for a walk. Outside, I told Jake a piece of his story, our story. A story he’d heard before.

“On the day we met you,” I said, “your dad and I were amazed by your joyfulness. Here you were, abused and practically starving, yet you decided you would find joy in life. Now your dad and I are here to help you remember the Jakeness deep inside you — and to help you work on everything else. You don’t have to survive on your own anymore. You have a mom and dad — and five dogs who love you. And you know how much those dogs love you!”

The smile returned to Jake’s face, and we talked about happier things. In the weeks following, I consulted with experts, researched new curriculum, and tried to focus on what was right about Jake rather than what was wrong about Jake.

Friends helped in ways they couldn’t possibly understand. Every few weeks, someone shared a story about Jake’s happy spirit — how he’d walked all the way across the room to say hello to them or told another kid not to make fun of someone, and I stored these nuggets as precious jewels, never knowing when we’d need affirmation that other people saw the specialness in our son, too.

About a year later I turned a corner in our home-school co-op just in time to see Jake scamper down the hallway, peek into a classroom, pound on the door and run away. “Jake!” I whisper-shouted.

“Oh, that’s your son,” a voice said from behind me.

One of the co-op board members gazed at me down the hallway. “Yes,” I said, “that’s Jake.”

“He’s completely out of control,” she declared.

My skin prickled. “He has boundary issues,” I said, “but he’s not completely out of control.”

“No, he’s completely out of control,” she said. “I know exactly what he needs.”

“I bet I can tell you exactly what you need,” I declared, in my head. Instead, she rattled on while I entertained thoughts of stuffing her into a supply closet.

Aloud, I mumbled, “Thanks so much.”

I retracted my claws and headed toward the multi-purpose room to reprimand my son. I found him helping a harried mom of seven with her unruly toddler. There would be ample time to scold, but just at that moment, it was time to appreciate what my son was doing right.

: Debra Hanlon is a former high school English teacher and community college composition and literature instructor, now a home-school mom. She lives in northern Illinois with her husband, her son and their five German shepherds. Her occasional blog is LifeItIs.org—Insights and Incidents. More Debra Hanlon

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Losing my husband, 140 characters at a time

After Kevin got cancer, all my rage and isolation went onto Twitter. Was I embarrassing myself, or rescuing myself?

By Lee Ann Cox

Losing my hubsand 140 characters at a time

Topics:Twitter, Social Media, Life stories, Cancer, Coupling, Real Families, Editor's Picks

There was a time when I kept private journals, chronicling stories of time with my husband as if words could nail down a life and build strong, warm walls around us. That was before cancer. A kind you’ve hopefully never heard of, a sure, slow killer. Once we’d slogged through a couple of years there, I logged into Twitter and didn’t grapple with whether or why. Rather than holding us together now, I was a spectacle of flying apart. Twitter unleashed my inner ranting-woman-on-the-subway. You know the one — no inhibitions, breaking the code of civilized silence.

Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

sobbing in Hannafords where pharmacist unmoved by pain of stage IV metastatic cancer. 4:38 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

HE, unlike me, would be a more diligent caretaker of his loved one. He basically said this. 4:41 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

With a bit of distance I see my tweets as a record of how stress and trauma affected me. Most times in my life, I surely would have headed to the car at any early sign of impending tears. But I just didn’t care. I needed juice boxes and cat litter.

When Kevin and I met, we uprooted each other. He was all Berkeley and blue eyes with lightning wit, crazy intellect, consuming passions — books, politics, computers, for some reason, me, even if I had to kiss him the first time, sitting on a beach in winter as a cold wind came off the Pacific.

But we lived on opposite coasts. I was seven years older. It was improbable and romantic, but he quit a good job, packed his belongings — with a bit of the grad student’s soul still — into a two-door Honda Civic and drove to my house in northern Vermont. Kevin missed his friends and the rhythm of the city, but we got a Newfie and we cooked, and when his favorite Latino band came from L.A., I danced like never before. Through it all I made notes of the absurd and the beautiful. The idea of tweeting that time would have felt as substantial as blowing bubbles into the sky through a child’s plastic bubble wand.

Yet soon enough we had both the child and the requisite plastic wand. Kevin would blow hundreds of bubbles — the signal that bath time really was over — to the sound of riotous laughter as they popped over sweet soaped toddler skin. I can still hear the giggles.

We had eight years together, a son and a daughter before cancer turned vibrant life fragile. It was mostly Kevin who fought to make the time count, even when it was hard, but I would try. Between rants I told some lighter stories on Twitter.

When taking a hot bath to relieve an aching back, allowing a 5 yr-old in is approx. as therapeutic as tubbing with a dolphin. Cheerful tho. 5:16 PM Jun 20th, 2009 from web

What’s most apparent, however, looking back over my tweets, is the isolation and the anger. No one in the supermarket ever asked if I might need help, at the hospital it was worse.

Why do people say things like “you don’t look too happy” to a woman standing alone outside surgery waiting room? 4:56 PM Aug 14th, 2009 from mobile web

I was almost always alone in hospitals, waiting for news from the operating room, waiting at Kevin’s side in the E.R. or by his hospital bed, often watching agonizing pain and struggle for breath. He had epithelioid sarcoma that originated in his pelvis then made its way through the lymph system to his lungs causing repeated collapse on both sides. The cancer itself was inoperable, but its side effects, along with radiation and various experimental chemotherapies, kept the specialists and the baby sitters busy.

Our social circles were small, our families far away. We were our own closest friends, content together, somewhat to our detriment I recognize now. Still, we were introverts not hermits. People are busy, I know. Medical drama is scary. But the ache and fatigue of relentless crisis gets etched in deep. I now view these dispatches as a defiant cry to be seen, to testify, bearing witness to suffering in 140 characters or less.

Kevin out. Surgeon-shoes splattered red-said it was hard but successful. Says he left him with two large tubes, minus couple cups of blood. 4:38 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

The surgeon had put in chest tubes to reinflate the lung, a procedure that gets trickier with repetition, we were told, as the penetrated skin grows thick and crinkly. Finally they let me into the post-anesthesia care unit to sit with him where the nurse drifts close as he slowly shakes off the bliss of unconsciousness.

Obvious I guess but hospitals r so gory. In PACU, neighbor dramatically swallowing blood. Then he laughs & wonders how the other guy (K) is. 6:37 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Never did this become routine for me. I couldn’t read or surf the Net. I sat rigid with anxiety and sorrow, my eyes traveling from the beeping electronic monitors to the tubing that snaked from multiple parts of Kevin’s body to the strong arched cheekbones in his faraway face.

“The other guy” much more peaceful, tho im watching his blood gurgle disconcertingly thru tube. Thankful no twitter while I was giving birth 7:09 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Dismissed to a room on the oncology floor, everything changes. Anesthesia is over. In less than two hours:

Peace turned to pain. Incomprehensible. 8:51 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from mobile web

There were friends and even loving daycare teachers who did take stints with our little ones, 5 and 2 when it all started. But I suppose I was hoping for more of a reaction from my tweets, maybe a SWAT team, though someone said that following me was like watching a distant train wreck through binoculars. What we got was a flurry of casseroles and “How can we help?” queries at the beginning and at the end of a nearly four-year ordeal. One person asked if we’d like bagels. Probably someone showing up with an assortment of poppy, pumpernickel and plain would have felt nice. We didn’t need bagels; we needed people. I didn’t know how to answer, and bagels never came.

I guess “tweeting” is too gentle, like a birdsong rising into the skies. Is there a shouting social network? 9:57 AM Sep 11th, 2009 from mobile web

Panic in the E.R. came in two forms. There was whatever-was-happening-to-Kevin, and there’s me, frantically walking from his curtained cubby to somewhere I could get cell reception, piecing together, while the battery lasted, a complicated plan to get the kids from daycare and school (at times in different towns) and through the evening until I felt OK leaving him. In the order of things, that had to be first. But just once, so early they hadn’t yet diagnosed the problem as cancer, Kevin was having a scary surgery on a Sunday night when the waiting room was ghostly quiet. A friend called. She’d made a plan with the other buddy in our triad. They showed up with knitting and a bottle of wine that we drank surreptitiously from paper cups. I actually laughed through the fear.

Hard being invited to a party, location: casa bon vivancy. People SHOULD celebrate life. But in casa de cancer, you’re living on an island. 9:51 PM Aug 6th, 2009 from web

I put us all in a shop window, and I didn’t make it easy to follow me.

One definition of heartbreak: 9- and 5 1/2-year-olds bending over a bed rail to give a last kiss & say, “I love you Daddy. I’ll miss you.” 5:34 PM Nov 17th, 2009 from web

Sometimes I ask myself if I regret the raw edge of this display. I read mocking reviews of “yet another cancer memoir,” and I wonder if the writer has walked those particular library stacks (that’s how we did it, pre-Amazon, back when I was 28 and my dad was dying of cancer) or paced those hospital floors.

Maybe I did get something I needed from Twitter. With no one’s permission, I gave myself a voice. Sometimes tender, furious or frantic, sometimes quivering with fear from bed in the middle of the night, listening to the too-labored breathing beside me. I needed to say these things and imagine some heart in the Twittersphere absorbing my crazed reality. My tweets may have merited the discreet, embarrassed looking away that we give the seemingly unreachable ranting woman on the train. I’m OK with that.

Since the first surreal days and weeks after Kevin died, my tweets have tapered to barely a trickle, though if I thought he would DM me I would tweet all day.

The first time his birthday came without him, I did post:

Kids and I just launched balloons into the night with glow sticks attached, green light disappearing into the sky. We love you Kevin. 9:22 PM Sep 28, 2010 from web

@leeanncox now turning off #cancer, #death, #widowhood.

: Lee Ann Cox is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and other national publications. She is working on a memoir weaving her Tweets and excerpts from Card Blue, her late husband’s blog, into a tale of love and cancer, online and off. More Lee Ann Cox

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Our successful open marriage

My husband and I may seem strange for wanting multiple partners. To my kids, this is what normal looks like

By Sierra Black

(Credit: Dmitri Mikitenko via Shutterstock)

Topics:Coupling, Newt Gingrich, Sex, Life stories, Real Families

I spent a recent weekend up in Maine with my girlfriend and our three kids. We went on long canoe trips, made mountains of buttery waffles, and read Rainbow Fairy books aloud till the words blurred together on the page. When the kids had gone to bed and the house was quiet, we crawled into bed and had sex so hot I thought the sheets might catch fire.

When I got home, I told my husband all about it.

My marriage is open. It’s also happy and stable. After I shared our mountain adventures, he filled me in on the highlights of his weekend: a small triumph at work, some quality time with his girlfriend, a successful home repair. We curled up at the end of the night, watched some old “Dr. Who” episodes and went to sleep in each other’s arms.

I never thought I’d have anything in common with Newt Gingrich. But if the claims that he once asked his ex-wife, Marianne, for an open marriage are true, then we might be more alike than I thought. Unlike that alleged scenario, however (which began with an affair), my husband’s and my open marriage has been based on openness and honesty from day one.

In fact, I’ve never been in a monogamous relationship. This openness in my romantic life stems in part from feminism and in part from idealism. I’m passionate about owning my own sexuality. I can’t stomach the thought of handing the reins of my sexual life to someone else, even someone I love and trust as much as my husband.

I’m also passionate about sharing. Being open in my marriage comes from the same ideals that make me shop at the food co-op and vote for socialist political candidates. If I were 30 years older, I’d be a veteran of the ’60s free love movement, staging bed-ins with my antiwar buddies. I embraced nonmonogamy, or polyamory as the cool kids like to call it, because I’m good at it. I’m prone to falling for people; my girlfriend likes to say I fall in love with lampposts. I’m good at communication and mediation. I’m bad at rules. Clearly, polyamory was for me.

When I got married and started a family, I just kept doing what I’d always done.

While some people leave polyamory behind with their wild youth, there are large numbers of families that quietly continue to embrace this life while raising kids and growing old together. Some of them form households with several adult “spice” (a humorous plural of spouse). More commonly, they do what I do: live with one spouse, whom they raise kids with, and step out for date nights with other lovers.

We’re largely invisible. When I pick my girlfriend’s daughter up at school, I don’t tell the teachers I’m dating her mom. I just sign the pick-up form and head home.

Nothing in my life is a secret, it’s simply my private business. When it does come up, people tend to be very accepting, but also curious. Don’t you get jealous? What about the kids? How does that even work?

My life sounds complicated, but in many ways it’s routine. The children are the main focus of our attention. My husband and I have three kids. We spend a lot of our time doing the things any parent does: picking the kids up from school, shuttling them to and from activities and birthday parties, cooking them dinner and reading them bedtime stories.

Since we’ve always been poly, I often wonder how monogamous couples do it. I get so much support from my lovers. No one else, not my friends, not my parents, no one, is as willing to deal with the messes and mishaps of parenting as my sweeties. There’s something about romantic intimacy that builds a family-type closeness. These are the people I call when I’m puking my guts out and can’t take care of my kids, the people who call me when their car gets towed and they need a rescue.

Polyamory enthusiasts like to point out that the word means “multiple loves.” They really want to stress the loving commitments people make, the way these networks of relationships support each other. It’s not about the sex, you hear over and over again.

This always makes my girlfriend and me giggle. Here’s a tip: It’s about the sex. If it weren’t, we’d be close friends and I wouldn’t be writing this article. The sex isn’t a bad thing: In fact, sex outside a marriage can be good for you. There’s a pile of scientific evidence showing that a new sex partner is the most surefire cure for sexual dysfunction and low libido, especially for women.

It’s much easier to keep the sparks flying with someone whose laundry you don’t have to fold. Having an outside partner means getting to date endlessly: an endless string of exploring new restaurants, trying new positions, long wandering conversations that don’t involve fights about the cost of day care or nagging reminders to take the trash out.

That’s hot. I get all the excitement of an outside love affair – the wild sex, the sympathetic ear, the chance to fall in love all over again – without the bitterness of betrayal.

This is a blessing and a curse. At its best, it makes everyone’s life better. At its worst, this kind of arrangement can sap energy from a struggling marriage. It’s easier to have fun with a lover than it is with a spouse that you can slip into the habit of playing only outside your marriage. One friend said, after watching his wife tart up to go out with her new boyfriend, “I used to be the lingerie guy. When did I become the pajamas and cornflakes guy?”

It can also be a challenge for the outside relationship. Remember that idyllic weekend my girlfriend and I had? We’ve been dating for three years. Eventually, many people who like each other as much as we do get married. Not us — we’ll be going out to dinner on Tuesday nights until the end of time. That’s a lot of dates. She’ll never be my pajamas and cornflakes buddy.

Now, to the jealousy question: If the thought of your lover being with someone else makes your stomach turn, polyamory probably isn’t for you. Most poly people feel jealous sometimes, but they treat those feelings as a sign of a problem in their own relationship. If I’m jealous because my husband has his girlfriend sleeping over three nights this week, I’m inclined to look at how I’m getting – or not getting – my needs met in my relationship with him. It’s not his sleepovers with her that are the problem, it’s that we haven’t had enough time together lately.

That’s not the case for everyone, though. Some people – maybe most people – really are jealous simply because their honey likes someone else. Their jealousy isn’t an arrow pointing at another problem that can be worked out. It’s a sick feeling in their gut telling them this is not the right relationship to be in. If you feel like that, do yourself a favor and hightail it back to monogamy.

That isn’t the real issue with polyamory, though. I once spoke on a polyamory panel. When an audience member asked what the biggest downside was, all the panelists shouted in unison: “Scheduling!”

That was back in the dark ages, before smartphones and Google calendar. These days, scheduling kinks get ironed out by technology. I can use IM to stay close to all my loves while I’m running through a busy day, hopping from work to school to home. Text messages let us communicate on the run, and online calendars make it much simpler to see when everyone is free.

Then there’s the issue of secrecy: What do you tell the children? What will the neighbors think?

Some of my friends are poly activists. They wear buttons, write magazine columns, march in parades. They want more visibility for our lifestyle so that, like our queer allies, we can be less closeted about who we are. Me, I’m content to keep a fairly low profile. Nothing in my life is a secret, but I don’t usually advertise the details to strangers.

To my kids, this is all normal. I’ve never had a big sit-down talk about how Mommy and Daddy’s marriage is different. They were born into this. We’re a big messy family. The kids know I go on grown-up sleepovers sometimes, and take it for granted.

Because we live in a major urban center with a large poly community, we’re able to hang out with other poly families a lot of the time. That helps provide community support for the adults, as well as making it seem more normal for the kids. I can go to a BBQ with my husband and our kids, spend half the time holding hands and chatting with my girlfriend, and no one will bat an eye.

Polyamory is not for everyone. Many people, probably even most people, prefer the simplicity of a monogamous marriage.

But a lot of people want something else. About half of married people will cheat during their lives. Another substantial minority – anywhere from 1 percent to 10 percent, depending on which expert you ask – are having intentionally open relationships. It takes a lot of emotional energy, and an ongoing commitment to complexity, to make those relationships work. But I wouldn’t do it any other way.

: Sierra Black lives in the Boston area with her family. She is a frequent contributor to Babble, and blogs about her family life at Childwild. She and her husband will celebrate their 10th anniversary together this year. More Sierra Black